The new politics of Stop Asian Hate

Lee was covered in so much blood that, according to Chin, the officers initially couldn’t tell she was Korean American; he said they told him the victim was African American, and he thought she might be a stranger.

When they said she could be Lee, Chin felt something in him snap.

Chin later recognized the man who followed her, too, even if he didn’t know his name: Assamad Nash, a 25-year-old Black man who reportedly lived in a homeless shelter nearby and was part of a group that Chin said he frequently saw using and selling K2 — synthetic marijuana — on the corner of Chrystie and Grand Streets.

Chin realized, he said, that “this was a crime that was just senseless.”.

There had always been a community of unhoused people in Chinatown, but now those living on the street seemed particularly on edge and prone to outbursts.

Over this past year or two, everything spiraled out of control,” Chin said.

He said his family has lived in and around New York since the 1930s and bought the building in the early 1970s; Chin started managing it only last year.

His family had always “kept a very, very low profile because that’s how Asians survive in America.” But Lee’s death, combined with the other incidents he’d heard about, felt to him like a pattern; just the month before, an unhoused man had pushed a 40-year-old Asian American woman named Michelle Go in front of an oncoming subway train in Times Square, killing her instantly.

Asian America can feel nebulous, lumping together people as varied as a third-generation Chinese American landlord and a Hmong refugee.

When that news-tracking effort morphed into an organization called Stop AAPI Hate and started inviting Asian Americans to submit their own firsthand accounts, reports of verbal harassment, public shunning, and physical attacks flooded in.

The name of the organization caught on as a hashtag, simplified, and spread: Asians and non-Asians alike went from calling it “xenophobia” or “racism” to calling it “anti-Asian hate” or even just “Asian hate.” A lot of Asian Americans would soon start using another shorthand: They began referring to any attack on an Asian person as a hate crime.

“A lot of people were like, ‘Don’t worry about it.

The specter of hate crimes has become a political rallying cry.

In New York, people including Chin pin the blame on 2019’s bail reforms and Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, who won last year’s election on a platform of criminal-justice reform.

That election saw voters in the city’s Asian neighborhoods swing to the right, a shift that community activists said was due in large part to concerns about public safety.

In Oakland and Dallas, Asian American business leaders responded to attacks by calling for more police patrols.

In May 2021, two months after a white man killed eight people — including six Korean and Chinese immigrant women — at spas in Atlanta, Asian American civil-rights organizations cheered when President Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.

“As a proud husband of an Asian American woman, I think this discrimination against Asian Americans is a real problem,” said Senator Mitch McConnell.

That puts Chin, and the many Asian Americans like him, at odds with the civil-rights activists who believe that measures such as rolling back that reform and putting more police on the streets will have a disproportionate effect on Black Americans.

“You’re seeing anti-Asian violence being used in a backlash against what people see as liberal or progressive, which is being used as a coded word for ‘caters to Black people,’ ” said Tamara Nopper, a scholar of Asian American race politics who has studied Korean American and Black race relations.

Lee soon became yet another symbol of all the indignities and violence of the past two years, as Asian American activists declared her death a hate crime.

Everyone will forget about this.’ But I don’t really want it to be forgotten,” said Chin.

He told me a story about how, in late January, he had encountered an unhoused man who he said was defacing a mural outside his building.

He turns around, and he was like, ‘Fuck you, chink.’ And then pulls out a can of pepper spray and sprays me right in the eyes,” he said.

Absolutely,” said Chin.

According to Chin, there happened to be a couple of NYPD officers in the station: “They said they couldn’t find him.

Chin characterized this incident — the man calling him a chink and hitting him with the pepper spray — as a hate crime.

But he wasn’t charged with a hate crime.

In legal terms, hate crime means something specific: a crime motivated by bias based on some aspect of the victim’s identity, typically their perceived race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender.

One aspect of her job involves explaining to Asian American victims why their cases may not be prosecuted as hate crimes — a charge that would require evidence of explicit animus toward the victim’s perceived identity, such as a shouted slur or a pattern of targeting people of the same race.

Federal hate-crime statutes have their roots in laws first passed in 1968 in response to attacks on Black Americans and civil-rights activists.

Black Americans are still by far the most common victims of reported hate crimes: A 2020 FBI report noted that hate crimes against Black Americans had risen nearly 40 percent since 2019 to a total of 2,755 incidents.

But the most widely discussed takeaway was the 77 percent increase in reported hate crimes against Asian Americans, which totaled 279 incidents.

Another narrowly focused, more recent survey implied a drastic jump between 2020 and 2021: The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found that across 16 of the country’s largest cities, including New York, hate crimes against Asians had jumped 342 percent?

But to groups like the Asian American Bar Association of New York, the difficulty of proving something a hate crime means governments are failing to take bias-driven attacks seriously.

In the first three quarters of 2021, AABANY researchers found that for the 233 reported attacks against Asian Americans they had documented in New York, the NYPD had made only 91 arrests.

Of that number, fewer than half of the defendants were charged with hate crimes, resulting in only seven hate-crime convictions, a number the Manhattan DA’s office — which disputes AABANY’s methodology — says has since risen to eight.

That often just does not happen with crimes perpetrated against Asian Americans,” she said.

Perez’s charges were upgraded to include murder and manslaughter, but the attack wasn’t designated a hate crime.

She said she was struggling with the tension “between what it means to hold people accountable for the harm that they have done and yet, at the same time, not to promote overincarceration or overpolicing, particularly in certain communities.

We read the impassioned op-eds written by other East Asian professionals with liberal, anti-racist politics pleading for people to truly see us, and we quipped that we would actually prefer to remain unseen.

These activists pointed to the fact that unhoused people were responsible for some of the most widely reported attacks, including the deaths of Lee, Go, and 61-year-old Yao Pan Ma, who was assaulted in East Harlem.

Those in favor of the shelter pointed out that providing housing and medical care to unhoused people would improve community safety, but their voices were largely ignored.

The scholar Tamara Nopper told me she felt some Asian Americans were using hate-crime discourse as a way to avoid “dealing with anti-Blackness.” She admitted she had hesitated to tweet #StopAsianHate because she was concerned that joining in would contribute to the impression that we’re living through a crime wave and should turn to carceral solutions.

And even then, not all Asian Americans are to be trusted: DCC’s Twitter posts are littered with disparaging references to “boba liberals” and “blue-check Asians,” people who Zhang said “sell out other Asians” to seem like they’re helping other marginalized groups.

Nguyen isn’t sure if Jackson, who is Black and was reportedly unhoused at the time, said anything to her directly — but police investigators said he told them he had hit her because he “doesn’t like how Chinese people look” and “thinks Chinese people look like measles.” For a week after, Nguyen said, it hurt to cough or move her neck.

I don’t want him to be like that.” A spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s office later said Jackson had been deemed eligible to go through the borough’s Mental Health Court, which would place him in a mental-health program as an alternative to incarceration; these programs usually last from one to two years. .

Since Lee’s killing, Chin had taken it upon himself, as he put it, to “clean up the neighborhood as much as I can.” He handed out pepper spray to his tenants; in an effort to discourage people from loitering, he removed his building’s awnings, which had offered shelter and shade to some of the neighborhood’s unhoused residents

Roosevelt Park, where he felt that the drug problem was getting worse and worried that local seniors were at risk for crimes of opportunity — which he said could also be called “hate crimes.” 

A few days after I first met Chin in the spring, New York governor Kathy Hochul passed the state budget, which includes a limited rollback of the 2019 bail reforms as well as an expansion of Kendra’s Law, a statute that allows judges to mandate psychiatric treatment for people with mental illness

While some feel the statute forces people into unwanted treatment and unfairly assumes that those with mental illness are prone to violence, Asian American activists had called for this change after the death of Michelle Go, and both Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams had championed it

The budget also includes a provision making all alleged hate crimes committed by adults potentially punishable with a night in custody

Chin was still convinced that the unhoused population was making Chinatown less safe, and he bristled at the suggestion that fighting a homeless shelter in a city where the majority of unhoused people are Black is itself a form of racism

“Honestly, this is nice here,” Chin said